Many of us are looking forward to the last big tournament of the year, and I am organizing my own thoughts and looking to see how my fellow stimhackers are thinking about this subject.

I am assuming that order n’ chaos will NOT be in play, despite ffgs words to the contrary. FFG has an unblemished track record of promising the deluxe box 2 months before it actually arrives.

But having the full lunar cycle is certainly likely - what corps and runners do you think will be worth putting together and testing for the top tier? Here are my own opinions in no particular order:

Tier the First

HubBL - near earth hub biotic labor
Andromeda good stuff
Prepaid Kate

They have the best winrates and show no signs of stopping. Wider use of chronos project and possibly dockland crackdown represent useful hate that works equally well against shapers and anarchs.

Noise something*

probably tier 1 from cache, I haven’t seen much from him that blows my mind yet, but there is plenty of room for a killer deck design to emerge I think.

RP Glacier
HB Glacier

This deck represents the best glacier deck in the metagame right now, but I think HB glacier is still tier 1 and architect will probably help it, this is one of the ones that is metagame dependent and I am not sure how it is going to shake out.

Personally, I am interested in playing glacier at worlds, so what rises to the top is kind of dependent on how the runners shake out…

Right now runners are geared to parasite weak ice, and datasuck everything else (more or less), femme fatales appear as 1 ofs in basically everything, and the only thing they don’t have any control over is the number of subroutines on an ICE…

This is RP’s defining feature, the runner has his supply of parasites pressured, and datasucker counters are meaningless because no amount of datasuckers will remove that 1c:1sub exchange on almost every breaker. This deck needs to go heavy on ICE to keep parasites from exposing centrals to heavy punishment.

Right now, Atman runs a train on basically everything, but are we on the precipice of the switchbladepocalypse?

Potentially multiple faeries every turn for free seems horrifying to me. I was fine with the dagger decks we saw a little bit of because it was a little slow and still going 1:1 on subroutines, but this stilleto bullshit really grinds my gears.

A rig of morningstar switchblade and yog taxes the corp more to install than it taxes the runner to get into.

The threat of will-o-wisp to them is real though, WoW is pretty expensive to use, but opens windows if you can afford. You can play around it, but it’s basically as inconvenient as getting hit by it so it will depend on deck construction a bit (Crypsis is self-trashing, so that is a point in it’s favor).

Maybe I am missing the mark completely and a trashable program + medium rig will be a force to be reckoned with?

It’s clear that pre-O&C the rig is all that matters.

Corp side seems fine. Corps are dealing with siphon, corps are dealing with parasite and sucker in whatever ways they know how. I think the main way is just flatlining people who try to be cute with their runner decks.

Dealing with stealth is a huge pain in the ass though, do you just build your servers 4-6 ice deep now? Or do you just play NBN and go faster than them no matter what they try to do?

Corps need to have plans for parasite, plans for atman, and they need the ability to pounce on weak runners and score if the runner goes non-interactive on you.

I leave finding the best way to wrap that package to you all.

Farewell.

Dishonorable mentions for things that I think will not be things:
grail decks
next decks

I know that right now Weyland is not in their greatest shape. But I really Blue Sun might pop-up at worlds. And if someone puts an effort building and playing with it I think it can be a very good deck. So you might see Blue Sun. Whether it will be a Glacier os a Supermodernis that can get a lot of money before the SEA Source + Scorched remains to be seen but I’m guessing the runner will have to pack their plascretes back again!

I would agree with you on the top tier decks. I definitely agree that HB Glacier has a slight edge on RP, but they rely more heavily on big scoring windows as opposed to having nisea and ash with the extra click mandatory run that allows RP to take greater advantage of those windows. HB stuff is at least as taxing and has high enough strength to avoid the parasite pitfall that we all know we’re going to face.

It’s so hard to not play NBN, to be honest. Even at it’s worst, most runners have to try hard to win. At it’s best, it’s almost unbeatable. The last NEH game I played there was only one scoring window on turn 4 or 5 that allowed me to chain out and win the game. San San City Grid, drop astro, next turn fast track and grab astro 2. At that point, the runner was almost helpless: even if they get r&d lock NEH has tools to bust it and draws like a fiend.

Runner wise, while there’s a lot of talk of “tier 1”, I don’t know that it’s as true as it once was. Runners run, and it’s a variance game for runners, so even decks below tier 1 can win. I don’t think Andromeda is as far ahead as other builds, and I definitely don’t think Prepaid Katman is on the same level as andromeda. Noise is rising to the top because a lot more people are playing him and his ability is probably the best runner ability in the game. I played against a professor deck that actually beat my NEH deck… really changes your perspective of “tier 1”.

The point here is that while andromeda has consistency and cash, the flexibility of shaper and the mill power of noise (sorry, but I don’t think the other anarchs are quite there; maybe quetzal) make any well constructed runner deck a force to be reckoned with. For runner probably more so than corp, knowing your deck, the flow of the game and avoiding opening scoring windows will win games regardless of your ID.

Blue sun is an interesting case, and I don’t have an opinion on it yet. I haven’t personally explored the potential builds for BS - the primary reason for that being that weylands ice hasn’t impressed me much and it’s agendas are still chunky.

I plan to start by building it as a red coats deck and working from there.

DJhedgehog:

The point here is that while andromeda has consistency and cash, the flexibility of shaper and the mill power of noise (sorry, but I don’t think the other anarchs are quite there; maybe quetzal) make any well constructed runner deck a force to be reckoned with. For runner probably more so than corp, knowing your deck, the flow of the game and avoiding opening scoring windows will win games regardless of your ID.

Well put, I would agree that the power of corps right now is such that you can win with almost anything, and that hub is much better at scoring than glacier decks are at taxing.

Runner side I will concede that you are correct as well - in the present at least, but things aren’t likely to change this cycle.

I am biased towards Kate, so I forget how often I lose to kate-type decks (almost never). So It’s easy for me to write those games off as mistakes from the runner.

By Stiletto in the original post I assume you mean Switchblade, and I’m inclined to agree - Switchblade is going to be fantastic. Two stealth credits to smash through any sentry in the game (or only one for strength 0 ones) is unreal.

I’m sort of considering switching to HB Glacier or even (if such a thing is possible) Blue Sun Glacier. I’ve been running RP Glacier for months now with a lot of success, but I feel like it’s starting to lose its edge due to a few major things:

Switchblade, which turns taxing ice like Komainu into not-taxing ice unless I can install and rez more of them than the runner has stealth credits.

I’d like the room in my agenda build to run the Fragments, but in RP it’s hard to justify giving up The Future Perfect. (In a Harmony Medtech variant I guess that’d be less of a concern since it needs TFP + 3 more 5/3s, but I still think Harmony is strictly tier not-1 – too easy to lose to simple variance.)

Several of the cards I really enjoy in my RP deck - other than the ID, of course - come from HB anyway. Eli, Ash, Enhanced Login Protocol.

I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to do for my runner deck. I have a Noise deck but I don’t feel confident in using it; it’s fun, and sometimes it’s disruptive, but even after three or four weeks or running it I don’t have a handle on whether it’s effective or not.

Noise directly correlates to two factors: A) Super skill cap, but huge advantage versus glacier decks. B) Were you forced to mulligan, was the mulligan bad. Shoot yourself in the head. Nothing shuts down Noise harder than a bad mulligan. The deck in and of itself runs great IF you can pull resources. I can’t tell you how many times all three of my pawn shops were in the bottom 15-20 cards of my deck though. That is a real problem. If we get big box before worlds then hell yeah Noise is going to be huge, but because Noise is a thing, people are probably going to play a lot more NEH; since Noise isn’t a fast win deck and beats glaciers and is popular. Also expect Quetzal Keyhole to be a thing if Blue Sun comes out. Weyland has huge potential with that HQ and people won’t be expecting it, or know how to play against it.

I expect Andy to be the highest represented because of the sweet new criminal prints, and reliability. The tempo of the game is speeding up with so many punishing cards against glacier and parasite recursion. I would rate HB > Jinteki Glacier right now, especially with GRAIL ice falling into play; Foundry might ACTUALLY be a thing now. People are saying end run and trash program aren’t enough GRAIL, but there are only 2 NEXT ice, and they are 3/3 of already.

I don’t know about you, but kill decks are becoming more and more popular in my area. I’ve seen DeadCoats (a RedCoats framework with Punitive Counterstrikes), NEH with Scorched Earth/Snare or SE/Midseasons/Psycho, and even a resurgence of PE decks (using Dedicated Response Team of all things). Don’t know if they’ll be enough to compete with top level decks, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see at least one deck in the T8 that has a flatline as a serious alternate win condition.

Just wanted to add that while I also think it’s slightly more likely O&C will not be legal for world’s, the other possibility isn’t too far afield. FFG updated its Upcoming page maybe 4-5 days ago to say that the deluxe expansion is at the printers, which puts it ahead of the queue (only technically) of both All That Remains and the Source.

Since deluxe expansions would have a longer manufacturing time (due to more various elements/packaging/coodination) than data packs, its arrival might coincide with the the end of the cycle.

I’m super pumped for some of the new Corp toys coming soon. Hostile Infrastructure would/will hurt Noise quite a bit and is pretty worthwhile on its own. (I’m assuming any Runner-controlled effect triggers the conditional, such as Parasite). I’m still waiting for many of the horizontal play options to really come together into a new archetype but that’s unlikely. Ashigaru is fun because at 4 strength it’s D4vid-proof.

Edit: Public Sympathy might make more of an appearance as kill protection depending on how much people like Duggar’s. .

Yes, I do agree that weyland needs a few more piece of ICE before Blue Sun becomes something. But I think with a redcoats like build it can be good.
You can “recur” Elizabeth mills for bad pub removal, which is something that can help making your server taxing. And Mills isn’t that bad of a card, you can always thrash Wyldsides or Pawnshops to help you out against noise.
The root is a very good card that isn’t very good out of Weyland right now because the need of a server for it + bad pub to thash it makes it not shine. In Blue sun you can put it on your scoring server and use the 3 credits per turn until you need to score something, then you just put ir back on your hand.
Changeling is a very good ICE that comes in the same pack that can help against Switchblade, since it can become an ETR sentry along with your other program thrasing one. It has also defenses against Femme Fatale, parasite and knight [They will need to instadestroy it or lose the parasite]
I’m not saying it will be tier one instantly, but it might catch a lot of people off guard. Especially if they aren’t expecting Weyland and stop running plascretes. [Which is something I’m seeing lately]

If you’re a smart, meta-watching player, you play some sort of damage. Snare! out of faction is still great, and followed up by a scorch is going to win against a lot of these runners who think they have to win fast.

@chill84 I don’t know if you’re bored with CI or just don’t think it’s good enough, whatever. The deck you have been running is really, really good and has a lot of “just win” options. I’ve tried it a good amount with some success, but you really have it down. I was thinking about throwing it together and getting some practice in and taking it to worlds. I was originally really excited about IQ, but became less so after thinking about it in a flow of the game mindset.

I don’t think there’s going to be a Switchbladepocalypse. Switchblade will be a great insurance policy for stealth decks – keep 2 stealth credits around if you fear Archer or some other nasty sentry – but 2 stealth credits is a lot. I think that in general a stealth runner will be able to break one sentry per turn with Switchblade, which isn’t really enough against RP. To do more, they’ll need to get two sources of recurring killer-usable stealth credits, and if they need emergency stealth Credits to break a surprise Archer (or whatever) then they’ll have to start draining their Ghost Runner.

I do think a stealth splash could be quite good in some decks, but which decks and which splash remains to be seen.